It’s that weekend again

Dozens of Christmas trees … one of those ideas which sound tacky on first hearing, but its incarnation each year gives a surprising number of people pleasure, looks magical in a kind light (especially in our ancient church), and incidentally raises a lot of money for various good causes. And every year there are some few which are witty, beautiful, creative, surprising or informative. Examples:

a tree behung with clocks and watches for a charity supporting creative arts for the well-being of the elderly (a novel way of presenting statistics – apparently the average time for which most very elderly have nothing to do is 11 hours per day)

a ‘snowy’ tree full of tiny but totally recognizable knitted garden birds – each distinguished not only by its colours but by its own particular jizz, created by a local faith group – the cute factor is about 112%

a collection of ornaments made from plain old wooden lolly sticks on a school tree, which manage to make the tree look graceful, tranquil and harmonious

a very synthetic white plastic tree decorated with real pressed and dried red autumn leaves – virginia creeper, cherry, maple … who would have thought of that, and yet it works (well done bell ringers)

Our astro society tree is in another venue, and is dressed with some paper telescopes I designed and starry ornaments in between. It doesn’t come into the beautiful category, but hope it does get into the creative set – I admit to being smug about the telescopes.

I went to a decorate-a-tree festival in the parish church in Dalton-in-Furness last year and it was the first one I’d heard of. All of a sudden they are everywhere. The world is obviously changing too fast for me to keep up.
That statistic about elderly people having nothing to do for 11 hours a day is scary. That needs to change.
Yours thoughtfully . . .

I was horrified to discover that this was the 17th year we have held our local festival – thought it was about 12 years, but obviously it is later than I think.
I dropped in again this evening; the crowds have gone and in the empty church you could hear the clock tree counting to itself in sinister heavy ticks.